Grandchildren in Mining

The joy of life is offspring: children & grandchildren and all their variety. I have not posted much on this blog in the last two weeks as I have been in California with four of the eight grandchildren.

Now I am back in Vancouver to face the bills, the credit charges, and the results of indulgence of off-spring.

We ate at TK Burgers, swam the Pacific, rode tiny bicycles for the first time, and played baseball in the dead-end of the townhouse complex looking out for mad Greeks driving too fast down domestic lanes.

We took over a thousand photos, whittled down to 165 for printing and memories. I am not permitted to post any for my children and in-laws protest at the pictures of my grandchildren on this blog. “Never know what mad man is looking and plotting,” they say.

So I read a novel of murder on the plane from Santa Ana to Vancouver. Jo Nesbo’s The Bat. A great detective novel from 1997, originally in Norwegian, now in English. Disturbing as any murder narn should be. Ordinary people gone mad and to murder is what it is about. Could any of them be me or my offspring is the persistent question?

The youngest is loud. And bold: no crying at hurt; no softness at hugging; simply a steel determination to do and be.

So unlike his sister: soft; cute; loving; and gentle to the touch.

Or the California chubby: manipulative; always hungry; and alone in a world that will never understand her.

Or the Jewish angst: detailed; neurotic; enquiring; and now determined to deny the authority of parents and society.

I thinks of the four in Iowa: poor; on welfare; non-earning parents; supported by me and the state; Republicans & Libertarians of muddled perspective.

Damn those people in Washington and Orange County with their certainty and mean-spirited perspective. How could the Iowa kids survive in the absence of state help?

We all make our money from mining. We all spend it according to our conscience. We all make it possible for our kids and grandkids to survive in modern America with the money we get from mining. They do not understand or appreciate. They simply see this as the way the world is.

And we read daily about people who deprecate mining and profit and the family.

Those who are most vociferous are but sterile and deprived: they have no kids and no grandkids. They pontificate in the absence of human experience. They are loud in defence of vegans, vegetarians, recyclers, and books printed on rough paper. They are less than human—they are bloggers & journalists of no perspective–but of loud, uninformed opinion.

So back to work next week. The money will be spent on personal pleasures and kids and grandkids. Thanks to mining.